Things We Never Said – Susan Elliot Wright – 3/10 (DNF)

If it’s not an unfaithful partner, it’s a fraught pregnancy. Why, oh why, are we as readers condemned to these miserable renditions? Why can there not be a happy marriage? A simple pregnancy? Children who are well-behaved and intelligent? I suppose none of that makes for much drama, but still. These recurring slow personal tragedies exhaust me.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Maggie awakes in what is undeniably a mental health facility in the 1960s, back in the day when mental health facility was not a way in which one would have commonly heard such a place described. I didn’t get to read much of Maggie’s story but there is a mystery as to why she ended up there, and how she is going to be treated by the psychiatrist who seems to pride himself on pioneering methods. In our other storyline, Fiona has fallen pregnant in the probably here and now (certainly London after 1990-ish), and is delighted, and Jeremy is glad to be at the end of two years of trying, but cannot bring himself to tell his family. Fiona is not happy that he won’t tell his grouchy father; and at the point at which I abandoned the novel, Jeremy’s mother was on the phone.

(this review is really a whinge about how many “women’s fiction” novels are about infidelity and problems with pregnancy. Why can’t we have more books like Code Name Verity?)

Additional information:

Unsolicited copy sent by the publisherPublisher: Simon & Schuster, 384 paperback pages Order The Things We Never Saidfrom Amazon** this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting